links for 2009-12-28

This is a basically a repeat of last night's talk. We're at an important moment now with JavaScript, and I think it's a good time to look at how we got to where we are and where we're going to go next, and how we're going to get there. I'm talking about JavaScript, but I really should be talking about ECMAScript. JavaScript is a trademark that's owned by Sun Microsystems, or possibly by Oracle — I'm not too sure what the status is today. The thing that describes what this language really is, the thing that's common that we all own and that we all share, is ECMAScript. We really should be calling it ECMAScript, which I find really difficult because it's such an awful name. But that's really what it's called, and that's what I'm going to be talking about tonight.

Brian's Brain is a cellular automaton devised by Brian Silverman, which is very similar to his Seeds pattern. It consists of an infinite two-dimensional grid of cells, but unlike Seeds, each cell may be in one of three states: on, dying, or off. Each cell is considered to have eight neighbors (Moore neighborhood), as in Seeds and Conway's Game of Life. In each time step, a cell turns on if it was off but had exactly two neighbors that were on, just like the birth rule for Seeds. All cells that were on go into the dying state, which is not counted as an "on" cell in the neighbor count, and prevents any cell from being born there. Cells that were in the dying state go into the off state.